As if the problems I'm having getting the greylist daemon [1] 64-bit clean and less Linux-centric [2] weren't bad enough, today I find that the Sendmail [3] client just stopped working. I checked the logs, and sure enough, the milter library [4] is bitching up a storm:
>
```
Oct 31 17:32:08 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: thread_create() failed: 12, try again
Oct 31 17:32:44 XXXX last message repeated 5 times
Oct 31 17:33:13 XXXX last message repeated 10 times
Oct 31 17:33:17 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon, mi_rd_cmd: read returned -1: Connection reset by peer
Oct 31 17:33:17 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon, mi_rd_cmd: read returned -1: Connection reset by peer
Oct 31 17:33:17 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: thread_create() failed: 12, try again
Oct 31 17:33:50 XXXX last message repeated 13 times
Oct 31 17:34:52 XXXX last message repeated 28 times
Oct 31 17:35:54 XXXX last message repeated 34 times
Oct 31 17:37:02 XXXX last message repeated 21 times
Oct 31 17:38:05 XXXX last message repeated 7 times
Oct 31 17:39:11 XXXX last message repeated 16 times
Oct 31 17:40:20 XXXX last message repeated 7 times
Oct 31 17:41:31 XXXX last message repeated 8 times
Oct 31 17:41:50 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: thread_create() failed: 12, try again
Nov 1 12:22:53 XXXX smgl: Address: 127.0.0.1:0
Nov 2 19:25:21 XXXX smgl: Greylist Daemon: mi_stop=1
Nov 2 19:27:56 XXXX smc: Address: 0.0.0.0:0
```
Okay. That mi_stop=1 doesn't look good; let me see what I can find out about that:
On Tue, 27 Jul 2004, Matt Selsky wrote:
> > Jul 27 09:12:20 clover mimedefang[22489]: [ID 649295 mail.info] MIMEDefang-2.44: mi_stop=1
>
This is normal.
Regards,
David.
“[Mimedefang] mi_stop=1 message in syslog [5]”
Lovely! Not only is it normal, but the only reference I found was dated 2004!
There was nothing at all about mi_rd_cmd returning -1, but I did find the following about the thread_create() failed: 12:
On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Stephane Lentz wrote:
> > PS: a folk running Linux reported a similar problem but he's not runing RH (Redhat). On Mandrake/SuSE I've never seen it. How much traffic do you process ? Which hardware ? Try to get some recommendations on system tuning from RH since you're paying $$ .
>
Here's some free advice: On RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux)3, type “ulimit -s”:
> > > >
> ```
> $ ulimit -s
> 10240
>
> ```
>
So each thread wants 10MB (Megabyte) of stack space. That can chew up your RAM (Random Access Memory) pretty quickly. I recommend editing the MIMEDefang startup script and putting:
> > > >
> ```
> ulimit -s 2048
>
> ```
>
just before mimedefang (not the multiplexor!) is invoked.
Right now, the sample red hat script does it only if you have more than 100 slaves, but it should really do it unconditionally.
Regards,
David.
“[Mimedefang] thread_create errors [6]”
Sweet Jesus! No wonder the Sendmail client sucks up memory like there's no tomorrow! Sheesh!
[4] https://www.milter.org/developers
[5] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/mimedefang/2004-
[6] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/pipermail/mimedefang/2004-